Fossil Wiki:About
The Fossil Wiki, the wiki about fossils, strives to be the premier source of information on all aspects of the prehistoric world and the fossils that were left behind. This includes information about the prehistoric world's oceans and geography, paleobiology, and articles about the various species of plants, animals, and other lifeforms whose fossils have been found. The Fossil wiki is inspired by Wikipedia, but can expand on fossil information in greater detail and with more freedom than Wikipedia. The wiki is a flexible, user-editable web-based database of information made up entirely of user contributions, and uses MediaWiki software. All the text in the wiki is released under the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. So why a fossil wiki? As you are going through looking for information, if you see something that is incorrect, you can correct it. If you see any information that is missing, you can add it. This way, the information here should be as up to date as possible, instead of having to wait for a small group of people to update the information as the world changes. The more people that use the Fossil Wiki, the more up-to-date the information will be! Name The Fossil Wiki's site name was chosen for the sites initial emphasis; on fossils. However, as the Fossil Wiki's scope broadened to encompass the entire history of the prehistoric world, alternative titles seemed to be more fitting. Paleopedia already exists on Wikia, and American English v. Commonwelath English might have raised some problems (Pal'e'''opedia v. Pal'ae'opedia. Articles and content This specialized wiki can include even the smallest and most specialized pages - e.g., every species can potentially have its own page (although currently, the goal is only to the genus level), and every clade and node, even a phylogenetic node mentioned in only a single paper (even if the pages are stubby). Also biographies of paleontologists, etc., and summarizes of books, write-ups on obscure paleo journals, etc. Contributing to the Fossil Wiki It is not necessary to be a specialist in some arcane subfield of paleontology (although if you are that is good, too!) Here are some of things you can do to help: * Contributing sourced material * Reporting and removing link spam and or vandalism * Checking the accuracy of material others have submitted or copied over * Copying (with or without editing) material over from Palaeos com (attribution template is ). * Copying (again with or without editing) relevant material from Wikipedia (attribution template is ). * Contributing graphic images * Suggestions for design, layout, etc. * Wikifying (adding wiki format, wiki links, etc. to other topics - see the for how to do this) * Proofreading and spell- and grammar-checking * Adding links, and checking that current links to other sites are valid * Adding bibliographies, references, etc. * Designing or adding navigation menus History and background Fossil Wiki was started on Monday, January 5, 2009 by Daniel Najib under the username of Meghunter99. Milestones * 1st article: ''Otodus obliquus * 50th article: Cretoxyrhina mantelli * 100th article: Isurus retroflexus * 1,000th article: Casamayoran * 5,000th article: Erbenoceras